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Move over, ice bucket challenge for the book bucket

It started with a promise made to a little boy. It transformed into a social media phenomenon that has sparked a dialogue about literature and reading.

If you’ve been on Facebook in the past few weeks you’ve likely seen status updates passing through your newsfeed that refer to the #bookbucketchallenge. People are encouraged to list the 10 books that have most influenced their thought — and to challenge 10 other friends to do the same thing.

For book lovers, it made a nice break from the ice bucket challenge videos flooding their newsfeeds. And that’s what Sujai Pillai hoped would happen.

He’s the founder of One Library Per Village, an NGO whose mission, “to digitally empower every village citizen, is all about literacy and education that’s relevant in today’s world,” Pillai said by email.

The ice bucket challenge gave Pillai the idea to create the book bucket challenge. As the ice bucket was inspired by someone whose family member had Lou Gehrig’s disease, so Pillai was inspired by a single person.

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“I had promised a boy in my village (in India) that I will give him some good books to read. So it just started with him,” Pillai said.

The #bookbucketchallenge has since taken off.

The meme, according to Facebook, has been around for a while, using the words “10 books” or “ten books.” When the social media giant sourced data based on those words in people’s status lines, here’s what they found.

Favourite reads

In the last two weeks of August alone (about the time the #bookbucketchallenge hashtag took off) the meme was mentioned in 130,000 status updates: 63.7 per cent in the U.S., 9.3 per cent in India and 6.3 per cent in the U.K. Average age was 37 and women outnumbered men 3.1:1, says a note in Facebook Data Science written by Lada Adamic and Pinkesh Patel.

They also aggregated the results to find the top 100 books. The first 10 were: the Harry Potter series, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Pride and Prejudice, The Holy Bible, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Hunger Games Trilogy, The Catcher in the Rye and The Chronicles of Narnia. (Read the whole list here)

For culture mavens, it’s been interesting to watch these phenomena as they gain momentum and move around the globe.

“The spread of the #bookbucketchallenge from India to Canada shows how ideas can go beyond geographical and cultural boundaries because of the Internet and social media,” says Alfred Hermida, whose forthcoming book, Tell Everyone: Why We Share and Why It Matters, explores these issues. “But for an idea to catch on, it has to resonate with an audience. There have to be people who are open to that idea and open to take it on and spread it on social media.”

Obviously this one did. “The response has been phenomenal,” says Pillai, noting that “millions of views have been clocked on the book names that have been mentioned on our Facebook and Twitter pages.”

While One Library Per Village hopes the challenge will ultimately lead to more books in the hands of needy children, there is also a greater social need being filled.

“By taking part in the book challenge, we are telling everyone that we value books and literacy, and are doing something about it, albeit in a small way,” says Hermida.

“Telling others about the books that are important to us also helps to strengthen our social ties. The choices say something about what we consider as acceptable within our social circles, making us feel good about ourselves.”

But it’s also opened up a dialogue about reading, for which Pillai is thankful. “More importantly, the forgotten habit of book reading is being thought of again as an important one and something that’s to be cultivated.”

As the #bookbucketchallenge made its way across India and North America, it seems to have morphed into something more personal. More about what you’ve read personally, instead of books to donate. With that have come accusations that people are putting out lists of books they’ve never really read, just to impress.

That shouldn’t come as a surprise. “The choice of books for the #bookbucketchallenge is a way of showing that we want to be seen as well-read, educated and erudite,” notes Hermida.

Toronto writer Anthony De Sa, whose latest book, Kicking the Sky, has been shortlisted for a Toronto Book Award, has put together his book bucket list for us.

“I’ve read some of these lists and many of them feel a bit contrived. Perhaps that’s not the right word, but I think when anyone posts a list like this, something that may be very personal and may reveal way more than the individual intended, people often edit their lists,” says De Sa. “I fought hard with my inner compulsion to do so. Candour is what we’re looking for and I’m not sure that’s what we’re getting.”

Still he says, “I’m fascinated by the whole idea of ‘a challenge.’ I understand the intent is for these initiatives to be fun and get the discussion rolling and, in this case, fill our libraries with books.”

The ice bucket challenge. The rice bucket challenge. The book bucket challenge. They’re all very easy memes to create . . . and to engage in.

“Social media has given trending a whole new dimension,” agrees Yvonne Hunter, the recently appointed manager of cultural and special events programming at the Toronto Public Library. “It’s fascinating to watch these phenomena evolve, sort of like watching the wave at a Jays game. As a reader, I’m always interested in what others are reading and the aggregate list Facebook has generated from the book bucket campaign is also interesting.

“From a public library perspective, we’re all about engagement, so a campaign that creates a dialogue on reading and combats illiteracy is a good thing.”

And putting books in the hands of little boys who want to read.

Book Bucket Lists

Jennifer Klinec, author of The Temporary Bride

1. Island of the Blue Dolphins, Scott O’Dell

2. Booky: A Trilogy, Bernice Thurman Hunter

3. Hard Times, Charles Dickens

4. Trattoria Cooking, Biba Caggiano

5. Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri

6. Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates

7. Open Secrets, Alice Munro

8. For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Nathan Englander

9. Great House, Nicole Krauss

10. The Cost of Living, Mavis Gallant

Cory Doctorow, co-editor of Boing Boing blog*

1. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

2. Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars, Daniel Pinkwater

3. Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

4. Neuromancer, William Gibson

5. Distraction, Bruce Sterling

6. It’s Complicated, danah boyd

7. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty

8. Pacific Edge, Kim Stanley Robinson

9. Monstrous Regiment, Terry Pratchett

10. Cruddy, Lynda Barry

*Caveat: a list of the books that influenced me most would be impossible because I have no idea how I’d measure such a thing! I’m a top 50,000 kind of guy, not a top 10 guy.

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